"All we want to do is eat your brains..."
To quote Rorschach; Hrm...

I'd intended to dive back into regular (or at least weekly) postings here, but I find myself without much of interest to say. Work is... lending itself towards a pessimistic outlook on matters that I don't want to jinx by talking about directly (knocks furiously on wood), and I'm making a concious effort to stay away from opening the second bottle of Grey Goose lest I ramble on late into the night and arise the next morn incapable of productive work.

(Although I don't seem too capable of productive work even when perfectly well rested. Meh.)

So I'll just treat y'all to a couple brief (for me) book reviews, which will at least let me return one of the things I borrowed from the landlord upstairs.

First up: Mickey Zucker Reichert's "The Legend of Nightfall."

You know what is the problem with most of the high fantasy genre? It's incredibly, irredeemably stupid. At least, that's the indelible impression left by this book. To quote a great literary critic, "this is not a book to be set aside lightly... it should be hurled with great force." See, I picked this book up thinking "I haven't read a straightforward fantasy novel in years... I remember enjoying them somewhat as a kid, and the mythic concepts and archetypes behind the stories are perhaps nearer the surface than in the gadget-clad technofetishism of sci-fi, the blind wish-fulfillment of modern drama, or the implicit sadism of horror. Perhaps reading fantasy will serve as a return to the wellspring of the great stories... tales of Arthurian valor or Odinic mysticism, Greek tragedy or Sumerian triumph.

Oh! Wait! How could I possibly forget about the abject Mary-Sue-ism of D&D? And the way it's completely sublimated the genre?

For those of you who don't know, "Mary-Sue" is a term for a fan-fiction writer who puts a character in the story that is no more than a wish-fulfillment mechanism for the author to act out her fantasies; "Mary-Sue" is inevitably smarter than Data, a better mechanic than Scotty, a better martial artist than Worf, saves the entire crew three times before breakfast and usually ends up in bed with Fox Mulder, John Luc Picard, and Mal... usually at the same time. (The "Mary-Sue" concept originated with female fan-writers for some reason, though I'm sure there are just as masturbatory writings from the male side.)

Of a necessity, D&D is a pretty Mary-Sue environment. Except when in the hands of an exceptional DM, the events of whatever story you're playing through invariably rotate around the player-characters as though they really were the center of the universe, and depend on some outlandishly heroic and skillful actions from the players, the like of which has never been seen before. The absurd level of fighting prowess displayed by a typical D&D character (mowing down legions of enemies over the course of their career) could only be surpassed by that of a character in a first-person shooter. Good stories rarely do this.

Let me introduce you to "Nightfall." He's the baddest mother... "Shut yo' mouf!" Just talkin' 'bout Nightfall! Nightfall is a larger-than-life legend of a near-daemonic assassin/thief. Nothing can keep him away, nothing can stay his blade, hell, there's a 19 stanza poem about how utterly unkillable and uncrossable a being Nighfall is. But, and here's the trick, it's all an act. The actual Nightfall is even cooler than that, Man! The story exists in a low-magic X-men world where some people are "born different, with special abilities and doomed to protect a world that hates and fears them. Nightfall has the superpower of altering his density, and has used it sparingly to grant him the advantage in combat, horse-riding and thievery.

Despite this, the first chapter has him exposed and captured while on a boat at sea. The crew turns him over to a local kingdom for the truly royal bounty. Nightfall promptly escapes, being the utterly cool PC he is, but is recaptured and subjected to the most contrived punishment evar. He is "oath bound" (greater geas) to the king's idealistic son, forced by magical oaths to serve as the prince's squire until he can get the prince landed. (As the younger prince, he doesn't stand to inherit anything and must be landed by other means.) The prince has no knowledge of the magical compulsion, and indeed would not have stood for it, as he has become convinced that it is his destiny to rid the continent of slavery.

Single handedly.

Does this sound entertaining? Here's why it's not.

Nightfall is a RIDICULOUS hyperbole of a Mary-Sue. Literally every town they go to Nightfall has been in before and has established no fewer than three aliases; knows every crook and town official personally, and is able to massacre entire rooms full of people without breaking a sweat. The pair are impoverished initially, down to their last few silvers, but Nightfall spends one night gambling and cheats the entire town out of a king's ransom... then lets himself be robbed, secretly follows the thieves (who he knows personally but who didn't recognize him) back to their hideout and doubles his money again by robbing them in their sleep.

The prince is another ridiculous caricature, lecturing Nighfall constantly on the proper manners and virtues of nobility with an air of naiveté rarely found outside of a crib.

Now add to this the fact that it is all hideously over-written. Upon every event of their ridiculous wandering, we're told what the "oath bond" thinks of this... at what level it's flaring up in Nightfall's consciousness and how to interpret its response or lack thereof. God forbid Nightfall construct an elaborate lie to the prince and we not be told how the oath bond reacts. Similarly, we're informed at every possible moment how Nightfall's insanely extensive experience or absurdly tragic upbringing causes him to reflect on every single event. And God help us when we finally find Nightfall's apparent betrayer and ex-lover, for her attachment to the little party becomes yet another aspect that has to be updated for the reader at every available moment. Thank god the writer started to loose interest in his X-men power; for the first half of the book we were obsessively updated on his current mass as well.

Look; well developed characters should not have to be constantly explained to the reader. Occasional nudges are fine, but if you did a good job creating the character then it should be frickin' OBVIOUS what they're feeling about the most recent development. TELLING us over and over again is just being redundant.

Anyway, in brief, we spend SIXTEEN CHAPTERS (~375 pages) reading hideously over-written "adventures" with Nightfall following doggedly after the prince. Along the way they are menaced by a sorcerer (they derive magic from "X-men" by eating their souls and are thus the designated "bad guys") and find Nightfall's betrayer/ex-lover. In the worst of sitcom misunderstandings, he refuses to listen to her explanation and silently fumes at her for about four chapters. Finally, fleeing a misunderstanding involving an EXTENSIVELY detailed insult to a lady's honor in which Nightfall had to free his prince from a dungeon (all by himself, of course), they end up at a tournament of arms where Nightfall (all by himself, of course) has to finagle a win for his master without anyone (especially the prince) suspecting. However, the crown prince is accidentally killed in the tournament, and Nightfall must accompany his prince back to the kingdom where the whole thing started in order to deliver the body. There Nightfall uncovers and almost thwarts (all by himself) a plan to kill the king, resolves his problems with his ex-lover, and everyone lives cliche'd-ly ever after.

This thing was a downright CHORE to get through. At the end, when things actually started to happen, I grew a little interested, but it took months to slog through that first 375 pages of horrible writing. There is nothing unique or interesting about this story... it's simply the author's masturbatory Mary-Sue adventure of the greatest thief / assassin / rouge / fighter / detective / magician multi-class 20th level character.

Fortunately, the other book I've read was much, much better.

People have been telling me for at least a year that I needed to read "World War Z." In fact, they brought it up so frequently that I was getting turned off. Much like my regard for BSG a year ago or Firefly (or, I imagine, Harry Potter, if I hadn't gotten on that train early), those things that attract such utterly unabashed fans actually become less attractive to me. It may be some previously unrecognized version of the elitist "it's popular, so it's shite" attitude, but I think it's more an aversion to cult-like devotion. The aura of popular attention around a property invariably affects how I will receive the work; if I like it, then I'm playing catch-up with the rest of pop culture instead of scything my own rarified path through the grain... acknowledging the herd's success means following it to it's next monthly flavor; if I hate it, I've instead kicked over the anthill of the devoted and am beset by a thousand irritating stings and must spend days defending myself against their venom. Better to ignore the shiny object entirely.

This conundrum is heightened when the shiny object seems especially designed as my lure, and can there be any more appropriate forbidden fruit for me than an accounting of a worldwide zombie outbreak?

Well, I'll keep you in suspense no longer; this is actually a really good book. I had lowered expectations because I'd read Max Brooks' (son of famed Hollywood icon Mel Brooks) previous work "The Zombie Survival Guide" and found it mildly amusing, but essentially a 200 page joke. As amusing as the material was, it was played out after about 50 pages.

Brooks, however, seems to have realized this, and this work turns every weakness of the previous book into a strength. The concept is quite simple; ten years after a world zombie outbreak (independently defined; there's no attempt to tie the book to the events in any of Romero or Fulci's films) has profoundly reduced the living population over the entire world, the narrator sets out to record the history of the event through oral accounts of the people who lived through it. At the time of the recording, the world has been "re-taken" from the living dead, though the mop-up promises to be decades long and the world has been profoundly changed at every level. Traveling the world, he interviews both key individuals and examples of the everyman; thus relating not a single narrative but dozens and dozens of narratives. Whereas "single points" of his "zombie survival guide" which were dragged out over two hundred pages, here the key moments are instead given only five or ten pages to play out. The structure focuses Brooks' writing to a surprisingly sophisticated degree and very rarely misfires in delivering its heroic or tragic figures.

In essence, the WWZ plays out in three phases. The plague begins in the rural countryside of China where it is quickly concealed by the government until it swarms entirely out of control. Before it reaches that stage, local Chinese flee the countryside through people-smugglers, carrying with them a bare few of those infected but not yet dead; scattering the seeds of further outbreaks across the world. The resulting outbreaks cause panic and flight worldwide, carrying with it more infected individuals, and de-centralizing the outbreaks such that they can't be contained or predicted. Second, a plan is developed by a reviled scientist in South Africa whereby the outbreaks can be limited. The plan depends on the abandonment of large swaths of citizenry by the military, as they can be neither quickly screened nor protected from the outbreaks, the military instead gathering small portions of the citizenry and retreating to natural strongholds around the world. (Essentially we're talking Dr. Strangelove.) This plan is the only one that proves effective. Third, after some stabilization of the rescued populations is achieved, the US demands organized attempts to "take back" the world, and eventually gathers enough other nations behind it to do so. (Don't be fooled by the prominent position of the US there... the story is remarkably decentralized.)

This, however, is only the backdrop against which the stories are told and sequentially organized. While the scientist who originated the plan is interviewed, more significant are the stories of the soldiers who had to carry it out. While the story of the first military defeat by the zombies is told first-hand, more tragic and horrifying is the story (told by a rehabilitated feral child) of a lone church where the congregation's parents strangled their own children rather than let them be killed by the zombies.

The book isn't entirely without faults... weirdly out of place is one segment; a faux-coy rant directed at celebrities and political commentators where a fortress-ranch populated by the elite and rich is wired for a reality TV show to be recorded during the outbreak. The fortress is overrun not by zombies, but by angry "commoners" who charge the machineguns seeking a safe haven. The punch line of the scene is a thinly disguised Anne Coulter wildly fucking her opposite (sorry, didn't recognize who it was supposed to be) as the gates were stormed. Also, middle-America in particular takes its lumps in the story of those RVers who flee to the Canadian winter without adequately preparing and must resort to cannibalism themselves.

There are a few other points that could be interpreted as political (ignoring for the moment the numerous interpretations for the book's central structure), and may reflect a bit more of a US or western-weltanschauung than its decentralized structure may imply. North Korea, we're told, just up and disappeared, every person across the border simply gone missing somewhere, presumably following their great leader without question into some endgame (whether Masada/Jonestown or underground bunker we never find out). Cuba, we're told, benefited the most from the worldwide tragedy, as much of the US wealth fled to that nation initially. The fascistic strictures of Castro's Cuba then meant little public outcry or resistance occurred when great swaths of citizens suspected of infection were rounded up and shot. However, exposure of the Cuban citizenry to American ways instilled enough of the capitalist spirit that Cuba had to give up their communist ways and instead become the new financial capital of the world. The fallout as it's charted in the book is always logical, but one might be excused for seeing a western bias in the more subtle choices where a situation could have gone either way.

Of particular interest, the repeated designation of Iceland as the "whitest of white-hot spots" (most thoroughly overrun) even at the time of the interviews may or may not be a profound coincidence in light of the current economic collapse in that nation, but it does make the overlay of the worldwide economic crisis onto the zombie menace particularly easy.

In the end, the stories in this book are cleverly and powerfully told, with especial praise going to the book's overall structure for allowing a rapidly maturing author to present his work in the very best of light. Rarely misfiring, we can only hope the upcoming movie does the book justice. (They'd better keep the "collected interview" format... trying to tell a continuous story would completely miss the genius of the book.)